Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Winter Issue 2022, Margaret Rodriguez, Patrick Regan, Rori Holford, Lara Taylor

Fonds and Feathers

This winter issue is the first issue of Fonds and Feathers, a newsletter of the Southern Miss Student Archivists. It was edited and contributed by Margaret Rodriguez, Rori Holford, Lara Taylor, and Patrick Regan. Dr. Jeff Hirschy is the faculty advisor.

Distinctive Sans Forgetica Font Does Not Benefit Memory Accuracy In The Drm Paradigm, Mark J. Huff, Nicholas P. Maxwell, Anie Mitchell

Faculty Publications

A common method used by memory scholars to enhance retention is to make materials more challenging to learn—a benefit termed desirable difficulties. Recently, researchers have investigated the efficacy of Sans Forgetica, a perceptually disfluent/distinctive font which may increase processing effort required at study and enhance memory as a result. We examined the effects of Sans Forgetica relative to a standard control font (Arial) on both correct memory and associative memory errors using the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm, to evaluate Sans Forgetica effects on overall memory accuracy. Across four experiments, which included nearly 300 participants, Sans Forgetica was found to …

Finding Balance: A Content Analysis Of How Newspaper Authors Framed Simone Biles Before, During, And After The 2020 Olympic Games, Hadley Howell

Master's Theses

Simone Biles was considered the GOAT, Greatest of All Time, going into the 2020 Olympic Games. However, after the COVID-19 pandemic, the Larry Nassar trial, and the weight of the world on her shoulders, Biles would withdraw from the women’s gymnastics team final competition for mental health reasons. Thus, the following study examines how Biles was framed in the ten most circulated newspapers in the United States before, during, and after the 2020 Olympic Games. Results show that an author’s race and gender, topic of the article, type of article, and if an article contained an image or not ultimately …

Impacts Of The Poultry Industry In Mississippi, Sara Watts

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the impacts of the poultry industry in seven counties in the Piney Woods region of South Mississippi: Wayne, Jones, Forrest, Lamar, Jefferson Davis, Marion, and Pike. Current research indicates that the poultry industry has a significant impact on the cultures and economies of rural towns throughout the United States. There is no current research that examines the effects of the poultry industry on residents of the Piney Woods. This thesis addresses that gap in the research and contributes to current understanding of how the industry molds and impacts the lives of those intimately associated with it.

I …

Message Convergence In Information Seeking And Decision Making Among Adult Children Regarding Their Parent's Diagnosis, Collyn Leggett

Master's Theses

Adult children have a unique role in caregiving and decision-making for a parent diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or condition. In this qualitative study, 15 individuals participated in one-on-one interviews to share their experience seeking information for their parent’s life-threatening diagnosis. This study utilized deductive and inductive coding approaches through axial coding, and two coders analyzed the data through a lens of message convergence framework and uncertainty management. The results show participants engage in information seeking from personal connections to the medical field to retrieve additional information from a more familiar, trusted source. The participants managed uncertainty retrospectively by reassessing …

Educators’ And Parents’ Attitudes Toward The Inclusion Of Students With Emotional And Behavior Disorders, Shannon L. Howze

Dissertations

Educating students with emotional and behavior disorders (EBD) has historically been a difficult task for educators (McKenna et al., 2021). The general education setting comes with many barriers when attempting to include students with EBD to the equation. Parents are instrumental to the success of their students with EBD regardless to the setting. Educators may lack in the skills needed to communicate, educate, and understand students with EBD. Without educators and parents collectively communicating and collaborating, students with EBD will not have the opportunity to have the positive experiences and outcomes to be successful. Applying the theoretical frameworks of Bandura’s …

The Role Of Mate Seeking Motives, Status Acquisition Motives, And Dark Personality In Predicting Responses To An Aggression-Provoking Situation, Savannah Merold

Dissertations

Aggressive behavior is associated with many adverse consequences, prompting extensive research on the potential adaptive functions of aggression. For example, there is evidence that aggression may be beneficial for attaining status and attracting a potential mate (e.g., Buss & Dedden, 1990; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Griskevicius et al., 2009). Additionally, several personality traits have been identified as robust predictors of aggressive behavior (e.g., psychopathic, Machiavellian, narcissistic, and sadistic traits; Chester et al., 2019; Neumann & Hare, 2008; Paulhus & Jones, 2017; Twenge & Campbell, 2003). These two research traditions (i.e., evolutionary and personality) have remained separate, with few studies combining …

Policy Implications Of Managing Biodiversity And Natural Resources Across International Boundaries, Dillon Brown

Dissertations

Fisheries Management under the best of scenarios is a complex action. It requires thoughtful consideration of resources that tend to be out of sight, widely distributed, highly variable both spatially and temporally, and present dramatic variation in life history and ecology. No one management approach has been developed which can effectively incorporate all these variables. Add to this the issue of transnational boundary movements of these resources, and one discovers that this complex issue needs to be addressed by multiple entities, agencies, and nations to have any chance of success.

This research set out to discover ways in which fisheries …

Reducing Anxiety Symptoms In African Americans Using Informal Mental Health Coping Strategies, Maleitha Nard, Kourtnei Jones-Dumas

Doctoral Projects

Research shows that the adult Black community is 20% more likely to experience serious mental health problems such as anxiety disorder (Anxiety and Depression Association of America [AADA], 2018). While this sobering statistic suggests the need for mental health resources in the African American community, findings indicate significant factors that depict how individuals view the mental health medical system, its health disparities, and noted inequities. Past experiences with trust and discrimination, minimal accessibility to adequate insurance, and lack of culturally aware mental health providers have all been supportive reasons for the African American community to turn to other coping mechanisms …

Seeing Children’S Futures Through Rose Colored Glasses: Does Optimism Bias Toward Reproduction Discourage Anti-Natalism?, Faith L. Brown

Dissertations

In order to examine the possibility that individuals continue having children and holding positive views toward reproduction regardless of how much their future children might suffer because of an optimism bias, I conducted two experimental studies examining the effect of optimism manipulation on people’s opinions of anti-natalism, the position that it is morally wrong for individuals to reproduce. In Study 1, participants received an optimism (v. pessimism or control) manipulation about either themselves or a future child before being asked to read an essay about anti-natalism and a control essay having to do with parents being involved in school …

Linguistic Imperialism: A Critical Analysis Of English Hegemony And Its Effect On English Language Learners, Linley King

Honors Theses

This study uses previous research and qualitative data to determine how foreign language teachers can present English to learners as an international communicative tool while also preserving their native L1 identity amidst hegemonic cultural influences. Since becoming a lingua franca, the majority of English users are non-native speakers, and the findings of this study explain how English has globally spread to create distinctive linguistic groups among these speakers and the importance of promoting the equality of their English variations against the “standard” dialect used in current monolingual English language teaching (ELT) policies (Canagarajah, 1999; Duff, 2005; Schmitz, 2014). Responses from …

Drinking Motives As Mediators For The Relationships Between Overparenting And Alcohol Outcomes, Tatum Freeman

Master's Theses

The present study investigated the mediating role of drinking motives in the relationship between overparenting and alcohol outcomes using a sample of 207 traditional age college students (i.e., 18-25 years old; M = 19.8, SD = 1.64). Data on participant demographics, drinking motives, the practices of participants’ primary caregiver, typical weekly drinking, hazardous drinking, and alcohol consequences were collected via SONA (an online participant management software that allows researchers to collect data from a university psychology subject pool). Participants were 89.4% female and 54.1% White. Coping and conformity drinking motives partially mediated the relationships between overparenting, alcohol consequences, and hazardous …

Stability Of Universal Screening Over Time: An Examination Of The Student Risk Screening Scale, Rebecca Wagner Lovelace

Master's Theses

Universal screening is a proactive method to identify students that are at risk for social-emotional and behavior (SEB) problems and provide information to schools to support early intervention for at risk children. Current recommendations for practice indicate screening should be conducted at three time points during the school year. Previous studies suggest that this recommendation is not empirically based and fewer screenings per year may be sufficient for identifying students at risk. The current study seeks to extend the literature regarding the stability and consistency of screening scores over time by analyzing ratings from the Student Risk Screening Scale (SRSS) …

Opening The Vault: An Osteobiography Of Three Individuals From A New Orleans Cemetery, Jordan Butler

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the lives of three individuals buried in Cypress Grove Cemetery in New Orleans through osteobiographies, which combines knowledge gained from human remains, material culture, and mortuary practices. The opportunity for analysis arose since the vault was being demolished due to its dilapidated condition.

The individuals were White and of middle-class status and date to the later nineteenth century. One burial is a middle-aged man who was of average height and showed no evidence of pathology; his muscle markers do suggest he was relatively Physically active during his life. Another individual is an …

Blind Spot: Implicit Bias In Health Care And Its Awareness Among Nursing Students At The University Of Southern Mississippi, Debora Skaliks

Doctoral Projects

While prejudice and bias are eminent topics in our society, implicit bias or unconscious bias is not as easily detected. Even though implicit bias may be a familiar concept to many, numerous healthcare workers frequently do not recognize the extent of harm such biases can impose on patients' health and outcomes. The Blind Spot DNP project exposed in this research paper explores the relentless question of the correlation between implicit bias awareness, implicit bias education, and its impact on health care. This Doctor of Nursing Project (DNP) project aimed to analyze whether implicit bias education and testing could increase unconscious …

Person-Centredness In The Workplace: An Examination Of Person-Centred Skills, Processes And Workplace Factors Among Medicaid Waiver Providers In The United States, Bret J. Blackmon, Joohee Lee, Rebecca Bain, B. Michelle Brazeal, Courtney Williams, Yolanda Green

Faculty Publications

Background: Existing research supports the effectiveness of person-centred practices in working with persons with physical, intellectual and developmental disabilities, but less clear is the influence of workplace factors on the implementation and quality of person-centred practices.

Aims: This article explores the influence of workplace factors on job satisfaction and on the implementation and quality of person-centred practices in healthcare agencies that provide home- and community-based services through a Medicaid waiver in Mississippi, a state in the southeastern United States.

Methods: Purposive sampling was used to collect data via online surveys to explore the interrelationships among person-centred workplaces, job satisfaction …

The Effects Of Segmenting Worksheets And Behavior Specific Praise On Independent Seatwork With Elementary Students, Lauren Peak

Dissertations

While the education system has seen many changes over the years due to COVID-19, one constant is that students must complete independent seatwork at certain times throughout the day. As teachers accommodate the many students in their classroom, an intervention that could increase students’ amount of academic production when doing independent seatwork would be mutually beneficial. For students, the increased contact with learning opportunities would provide the students means to increase fluency for that skill. Examining the effects of segmented and whole worksheets on production would, therefore, create additional learning opportunities.

This study sought to assess the effectiveness of the …

Examining The Moderating Effects Of Adult Social Support On The Relationship Between Adverse Experiences And Psychosocial Adjustment, Zachary Wilde

Master's Theses

Exposure to adverse experiences during childhood place adolescents at a disproportionately high risk of developing physical and mental health problems later in life (Anthony et al., 2019; Basto-Pereira et al., 2016; Brown & Shillington, 2016; Felitti et al., 1998). Further, at-risk adolescents, conceptualized as children and adolescents who lack resources for upward mobility, are more likely to be exposed to adverse experiences and thus are at greater risk for these negative outcomes when compared to adolescents who are not considered at-risk (Fernandes-Alcantara, 2018). To obtain better specificity of what outcomes adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) predict in a sample of vulnerable …

Entire Issue Vol. 11 No. 1, Stacy Creel, Ph.D. Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

No abstract provided.

A Bibliometric Study Of The Research On Instructional Uses For Nonfiction Graphic Novels, Tiffany Markulike, Mlis Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

The intention of this bibliometric study is to examine the research on the use of graphic novels in classrooms and libraries during the past two decades to highlight how this topic has changed and developed over time. The focus of the research is on the use of nonfiction graphic novels in the English Language Arts, Writing, Social Studies, History, Science, and Math classrooms. This study notes similarities in the research on uses for graphic novels and identifies the prevailing journals which have published articles on this topic. The authors who have written about this topic the most frequently are identified. …

Taking A Closer Look At The Codes List-Cookbooks For Gender And Academic Holdings, Jennifer Ottinger, Mlis Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

It is time to consider if cookbooks hold this disparity and closely look at the gender of authors in the culinary world. This study explored gender within the CODES List-Cookbooks 2019-2022, a juried list of cookbooks published 2018-2021, as well as determined if Texas public colleges and universities carry these titles. By evaluating this juried list of recommended cookbooks, libraries can use the research to take a closer look at their cookbook collection. The purpose of this study was to examine and analyze cookbooks from the CODES List- Cookbooks, 2019-2022, and ownership of the books by public colleges and universities …

Wellness Matters: A Website Content Analysis Of Wellness Resources In Academic Libraries Supporting Medical Schools In The United States, Rebecca A. Costa, Mlis Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

While it is standard for academic libraries to support education and research, many libraries also offer space or dedicated programming to promote the wellness and self-care of their users. Addressing student wellness demonstrates responsiveness to institutional priority and efforts to meet evolving student needs. In addition, it serves as an excellent opportunity for libraries to innovate and collaborate visibly in the community they support, further committing to a culture of wellness. This study examined wellness initiatives, resources, services, and events offered in academic libraries that support medical schools in the United States.

Federal Depository Library Program (Fdlp) Academic Library Websites A Webometric Analysis Of Academic Libraries Participating In The Fdlp, Leah Deann Isenhower, Mlis Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the website content of academic libraries participating as selective depositories in the FDLP to examine legal compliance and accessibility to electronic government information

The Expansion Of Digital Services In Mississippi Public Libraries, Xinyu Yu Mills, Ph.D. Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

A content analysis of 53 public library systems’ websites listed on the Public Library Directory of Mississippi Library Commission was conducted. The purpose of the study was to find types and levels of digital services offered by these library systems. The term “digital services” has been more used in recent literature, which suggests that more libraries started offering more since the start of COVID-19. This study intended to look closely how Mississippi’s public libraries follow the national trend.

Slis Notes: What Is A Library In Crisis?, Stacy Creel, Ph.D. Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

What is a library in crisis? One definition is that a crisis is an event beyond the normal situation that acts as a disruption to library operations and services and can damage the library’s reputation (Pedraza, 2010). These situations draw attention, usually negative attention, and scrutiny by the library’s user population, political/government entities, and even at times, the attention of the nation via outlets such as social media. Crisis management requires action in three phases—before, during, and after. The goal of crisis management is to prevent or reduce the impact of the crisis on the library. What can libraries do …

Slis Notes: Censorship Turbulent Times, Stacy Creel, Ph.D. Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

Just this past year in 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) had to release a statement in response to an increase in censorship of materials centered on LGBTQIA+ issues and books by Black authors, Indigenous authors, or other people of color. The statement in its entirety is found here: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/statement-regardingcensorship. The statement reaffirms that ALA and its Executive Board, Divisions, Roundtables, and other units stand firm in the freedom to read and against censorship.

From The Gas: Congratulations, Publications, Presentations, Stacy Creel, Ph.D. Usm Slis, Teresa S. Welsh, Ph.D. Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

Updates on USM SLIS alumni, faculty, and students.

Spotlights: Faculty, Alum, Kaigler Children's Book Festival, Stacy Creel, Ph.D. Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

Meet Dr. Brendan Fay, new Associate Director, and alumni Kristen Hillman, and get insights on the Fay B. Kaigler 2023 Children's Book Festival.

Slis Director's Report, Stacy Creel, Ph.D. Usm Slis

SLIS Connecting

Welcome to the Summer/Fall issue of SLIS Connecting.

Theory Building As Integrated Reflection: Understanding Physician Reflection Through Human Communication Research, Medical Education, And Ethics, Andrea Vicini, Ashley P. Duggan, Allen F. Shaughnessy

Journal of Health Ethics

Grounded in a presupposition that a single explanatory framework cannot fully account for the expansive learning processes that occur during medical residency, the article examines developing physicians’ reflective writing from three disciplinary lenses. The goal is to understand how the multi-dimensional nature of medical residency translates into assembling educational experiences and constructing meaning that cannot be fully explained through a single discipline. An interdisciplinary research team across medical education, communication, and ethics qualitatively analyzed reflective entries (N=756) completed by family medicine residents (N=33) across an academic year. Results provide evidence for moving toward an integrated thematic explanation across disciplines. The …